The mission is called PREFIRE, and that stands
for the polar radiant energy in the far infrared experiment.
PREFIRE will measure the complete spectrum
of emitted energy from the polar regions.
And by doing so, help us to improve our predictions
of polar climate change.
I think the biggest concern about the Arctic is just
how rapidly and how dramatically it's changing.
We're seeing changes in the Arctic
now that are unlike anything
that we've seen in at least the last 300 years.
So we're unprepared for those changes
and we really don't know what we're going
to need to do to adapt to those changes.
Each of our fire CubeSats carry
something called a thermal infrared spectrometer.
The thermal infrared spectrometer is an instrument
that looks down at the earth and gathers energy
being emitted from the planet at different wavelengths,
The instruments are
going to be attached to what we call CubeSat.
The CubeSats are about the size of a large shoebox,
and the instrument itself is going to take up about half
of that space.
The real ultimate goal of PREFIRE
is to be able to improve our predictions of 5 to 10 to
maybe 50 years from now so that we can be prepared
for those changes and adapt and make sure that the communities
that are going to be affected are resilient to those changes.
because the Arctic is changing so quickly.
There's a real urgency to getting this information now.
We need to have
better predictions of how sea level will change,
how the weather around the planet is going to change.
The only way we're going to do that is to understand
how the polar regions are responding to climate change.